Stanford Psychology Podcast

This week, we revisit one of our favorite episodes from last year (with improved audio quality!). In this episode, Anjie chats with Edouard Machery, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. Edouard's main research focuses on the intersection between cognitive science and philosophy. In this episode, Edouard shares his recent work on a topic that is extremely important for psychology today: replication. In an era of the replication crisis, it is more important than ever to understand the concept of replication. What are we really talking about when we are talking about replication? Is preregistration the cure-all magic for the crisis? Why is scientific reform so difficult? These are the questions Edouard ponders. You can learn more about his research on his personal website.
Paper: Machery, E. (2020). What is a replication?. Philosophy of Science, 87(4), 545-567.

Eric chats with 2024 Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton and Stanford Professor Jay McClelland, two pioneers who have spent nearly half a century laying the groundwork for modern-day AI, advancing research on neural networks long before it captured the world's imagination.

In fact, their early work faced significant skepticism from the scientific community - an experience they candidly discuss in this episode. This wide-ranging conversation covers everything from the capabilities of recent breakthrough LLMS like DeepSeek to AI agents, the nature of memory and confabulation, the challenges to aligning AI with human values when we humans don’t even agree on our values, and Geoff's fascinating new theory of language, featuring an analogy of words as thousand-dimensional, shape-shifting Lego blocks with hands.

Geoff, who retired in 2023, divided his time between the University of Toronto and Google DeepMind. With numerous accolades including the 2018 Turing Award and 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, he is perhaps best known for co-developing the backpropagation algorithm - now a cornerstone of AI research. Jay, currently at Stanford and Google DeepMind, has revolutionized our understanding of human learning through his work on Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP), applying neural network principles to understand phenomena like language acquisition. His insights into human learning have profoundly influenced how we understand machine learning.

Their friendship dates back to the late 1970s and grew stronger as both collaborated with fellow pioneer David Rumelhart. They share some touching memories about Dave in this episode. Remarkably, despite decades of friendship and building upon each other's work, this appears to be their first recorded conversation together. Eric challenged them to discuss their latest insights and disagreements.

This episode was recorded on January 29, 2025.

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Links:

Geoff's website

Geoff's Google Scholar

Jay's website

Jay's Google Scholar

Eric's website

Eric's X @EricNeumannPsy

Podcast X @StanfordPsyPod

Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

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Bella chats with Dr. Henrike (Henny) Moll.

Henny is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, where she directs the Minds in Development lab. Henny's primary research focus lies in children's understanding of perspectives and their ability to engage in joint attention. She studies how infants and young children come to understand the world and the role that others play in introducing them to the world. Her studies are informed by insights from philosophy of mind, education, and anthropology.

In this episode, we discussed Henny's research on theory of mind, young children's perspective taking, especially when other people's beliefs clash with their own beliefs or with reality, and how the concept of experiential record plays an important role in children's ability to understand other people's beliefs. Henny also shared the lab's future directions and some exciting upcoming projects.
Henny's website: https://dornsife.usc.edu/labs/mid-la/

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Joseph chats with Dr. Kurt Gray about what drives our moral judgments, how we reason about the morality of non-human agents, the factors underlying moral disagreement and how we can bridge partisan animosity. Dr. Gray is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he runs the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding. His lab investigates people’s deepest beliefs and why they matter for society and organizations.
Here are ideas and resources referenced in the chat:
3:52 | Moral Foundations Theory
6:25 | Theory of Dyadic Morality
7:42 | The Myth of Harmless Wrongs
16:36 | Mind Perception of Robots
19:45 | Center for the Science of Moral Understanding
36:00:00 | Moral Character Judgements
37:15:00 | Moral Identity picture scale
38:00:00 | Personal experiences bridge divides better than facts
44:45:00 | Six Guidelines for Interesting Research
To learn more about Kurt and his research, check out his lab website: https://www.deepestbeliefslab.com/
You can also follow him on twitter: https://twitter.com/kurtjgray
*We are currently conducting a survey to get to know our listeners better and to collect any feedback and suggestions so we can improve our podcast. If you have 1 minute, please click the link here to submit your anonymous response: https://forms.gle/dzHqnWTptW8pSVwMA. Thank you for your time and support!

Eric chats with Claude Steele, Emeritus Lucie Stern Professor of Psychology at Stanford. He is world-renowned for his work on stereotype threat and its application to minority student academic performance. In 2010, he released his book, Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, summarizing years of research on stereotype threat and the underperformance of minority students in higher education. He is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was Vice Chancellor and Provost at Berkeley and provost at Columbia and served as President of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

In this episode, Eric and Claude chat about Claude’s most recent thinking about stereotype threat, where people fear fulfilling stereotypes about their social groups. When and why does it matter? How can we create more inclusive and non-threatening environments, from work contexts to classrooms? What does it have to do with Carol Dweck’s growth mindset? Claude proposes that trust is essential to reduce stereotype threat: when people trust they are not judged for their social groups, they perform better. Finally, Claude shares how his growing up on the South Side of Chicago still influences his thinking, how he circuitously stumbled into psychology – and what it was like having Ted Bundy as one of his students!
WE NOW HAVE A SUBSTACK! Stay up to date with the pod and become part of the ever-growing community :) https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

If you found this episode interesting at all, consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology.
Links:

Claude's book: https://wwnorton.com/books/Whistling-Vivaldi/
Claude's website
Eric's website
Eric's Twitter @EricNeumannPsy
Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/
Let us know what you think of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]